Social media has been implemented in every aspect of business that is has become the essential tool of communication. Entire departments are pledged to marketing and communications, the output of which is on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. The way that all businesses communicated with customers, as well as workers (through job advertisements, news and even private groups) relied on a handful of websites owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or the CIA. The government had no need to monitor communications when almost everybody would publish their lives, from multiple images they had taken of themselves, friends and family, as well as their thoughts and feelings on a range of topics, including politics. The data from social media was being analysed at a micro-level, identifying and tracking individual activity, able to chart the emotions of populations, and manipulate them through advertising.
Marketing was more important than the object. The object itself was meaningless. The advertising around it, from billboards to product placement in films to paying influencers and content creators to promote goods on the stuff they would provide the platform (with no upfront cost, for free). Although each platform would pay their creators at a certain level, this created billions of hours spent by humanity trying to achieve recognition on their platform of choice so that they could live off the ad revenue. A majority are unsuccessful.
The strange beast of advertising had grown from capitalism like a new prophet. Whatever was being sold was unimportant. It was the feeling that a person had towards what was being sold that decided its true value. A pair of fine hand-made Italian shoes may appear in a jungle, and an ape would see them as perhaps a toy or even a set of hats. But if you were to explain to the ape that these shoes cost two and a half thousand dollars and would require working for two weeks (at minimum wage) just so you could have these shoes, the ape would think I was speaking nonsense. Marketing created value of thin air. The value of any object on the market depended primarily on its materials, labour and transport. There was little difference between a can of Dr. Pepper or a can of delicious Cherry Coca-Cola – yet whilst Dr. Pepper is seen as a premium brand and something that celebrities enjoy on their yachts, and therefore commands a higher price, Cherry Coca-Cola is drunk by crack heads and professional gamers. An unpleasant association is reflected in the lower price. Or is the lower price influential on the unpleasantness? This is unimportant. The marketing of either beverage has already decided who consumes it. It is the concept that the packaging evokes towards how you relate to the brand and the kind of concepts it represents. Concepts are an element of what makes us human, so the brand itself is presenting a collection of concepts that align to a perfect human/consumer hybrid and the idealised version of whomever wishes to consume their goods. That almost every aspect of this theoretical model of the economy was translated through six websites is bullshit.
Therefore, I was intrigued to visit Dequincy in Calcasieu Parish, Texas. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and military citizen surveillance AI (Meta AI), had bought an entire township in order to conduct an experiment of a future model of society. A society in which all of its people no longer needed to work, receiving an income from the corporation that owned the AI who now undertook labour instead. It was only fair that this multibillion-dollar company pay the workers it had displaced after all. They could afford it. Plus, if nobody had money then nobody would buy anything and then marketing was meaningless, throwing the whole model of economics up into the air before shattering it into a million pieces on a cold concrete floor. No. The serfs would be paid by their digital overlords, paying them to consume whilst the AI sent emails or wrote marketing copy, as well as other work.
All of this was well received by the citizens of Dequincy, Texas. Everyone in the town had been paid ten thousand dollars just for agreeing to the program. It seemed like a great deal. People no longer needed to go to work, would be paid a basic income, and were free to do as they pleased (including working for additional income from those that earned basic). From food production to road management to construction to administration to medicine to banking, almost every aspect of work was now done by Meta AI, either virtually or via the control of its humanoid robots. These robots, lovingly called ‘Zucks’ by the local community, stood at seven feet tall, weighed five hundred pounds and were each connected to the Meta AI via a live feed. The Zucks carried out various jobs, from cashier to teacher, and were seen all over town. It had taken a bit to get used to them, with teenagers targeting the devices in a particularly Luddite form of violence that was a TikTok trend for Generation Omega. However, after life-changing fines and a public dance performance, the Zucks were well-liked by the people around. Some had even decorated certain Zuck androids with particular outfits depending on their job, sometimes decorating them with stickers or unique paint jobs (with the robot’s consent).
As these Zucks ended up being quite personable, they grew popular with the workless locals. The people spent most of their time at home, having food delivered to their bedrooms as they spent most of the day looking at their phones. Meta had provided each individual with an advanced phone, in that it was responsive and had a big screen. People would watch movies or little documentaries or pornography or play games. Now and then they would crawl from their beds to relieve themselves in a litter tray they had in the corner (that a Zuck would come and empty every twelve hours). For those that went outside, they found their desire for interaction wasn’t satisfied by other people, but instead focused on the Zucks as each grew their own personality. A select few people had also taken to streaming themselves walking around the town, broadcast to people sitting inside who wanted the feeling of being outside without going to the effort of getting dressed and leaving the house. They had a steady supply of burgers, weed and sex toys that made most people quite content in their lives. For some, it was the first time for a long time that they had any time away from work without worrying about money. The company subsidised most of the basics, which also happened to be the products advertised to people in their bed chambers. It offered great market synergy. People were happy, the organisation were happy, the share holders were happy, and most importantly, the United States government were happy.
The town didn’t live in a bubble. The events that unfolded were watched by millions of people across America, jealous of the lazy lifestyle the participants had, enjoying seeing all the Zucks undertake old fashioned job and interact with the unemployed. Some of these Zucks became international celebrities, going on to star in films or be in bands, but fundamental to all of this was the envy at people getting paid to do nothing and live in a nest with a screen that did anything it wanted. The whole experiment is an advertisement for the vision of the future that Meta would one day offer. It encouraged citizens across the United States to write to politicians requesting that Meta try running the trial where they lived. People started visiting Dequincy from across the country, it became a tourist attraction for a philosophy. A world where nobody needed to work. The end of labour, a way to finally break free from the endless drudgery of working for a majority of your life, only to be constantly underpaid, tired out, away from the people you love. The town offered hope. We could break free from the 9-5, the commute, the irritating co-workers, the foolish bosses, the pay that barely covered the things you’d need to recover from working hard at a bullshit job. Was this the end suffering? Was this the end of capitalism?
Unfortunately, no. This was the ultimate expression of capitalism. Capitalism had evolved, it had gone Super Saiyan, it had taken total control of an entire solar system for centuries yet to happen. Capital no longer was interested in the shallow potential of money. It had total control over the lives of everyone. The only thing that had been holding it back had been the limits of economy, finance, government. By replacing almost every aspect of provision, capital now held every individual citizen in its palm like a newborn baby puppy. The ideology of capital had absolute control. It was over. All known sentient life in the universe had lost against a concept. It was quite sad actually.
Meanwhile, I walk through the town and notice some teenagers skateboarding. They were doing some sick tricks on the stairs outside the Dequincy town hall, doing ollies as easy as breathing. One of them, a punk, did a nosegrind down the railing of the steps, doing a kickflip before landing, totally relaxed, smoking a crucifix joint. One of the Zuck’s ran over.
“Hey, Security Officer here. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to give you a red flag for that, that prevents people from using the handrail. Hope that helps!” said the Zuck. The punk flipped it off, doing circles round the android as it struggled to keep up.
“Okay, I don’t want to have to reduce your Meta-Dequincy partnership rating, are you going to apologise?” said the Zuck. One of the other skaters threw an empty can at the back of its head. “Who did that?” it said, turning around. A crowd started gathering.
“You wanna reduce my social score, go ahead.”
“You know that will impact your basic income? Everyone actually gets an improved income when they sign up to the program. Meta doesn’t want to reduce you to the lower rate, so if we could-" says the robot. The punk does a kickflip ollie into the chest of the android, knocking it over.
“Lol.” Says the punk, skating off as more Zuck security bots arrive. Although people had been filming the interaction, all of the subsequent posts were edited, as well as the copies on people's phone and cloud backups. It was edited by an LLM so that the punk said slurs before pushing the shoulder of the Zuck, threatening it and anybody else collecting basic income from Meta, before hitting the robot with a skateboard and running away. The punk was quickly vilified as an enemy of the town, somebody who was no longer welcome in the experiment and should leave Dequincy and not come back. When they were found and exiled, they had the Mayor Zuck come and give a speech how Meta really cared for everyone in the town and wanted to carry on doing the experiment, so long as people wanted to. The townsfolk all started clapping and starting shouting their allegiance to Meta, as well as their appreciation for the Zucks that now lived among them. The Mayor Zuck thanked everybody, and agreed that the experiment could be extended so long as people signed up to the new terms and conditions of the social contract. They had made some additions to the agreement in order to keep people safe, it was nothing to worry about and was essentially what they were already doing. The Mayor Zuck also admitted it had made some mistakes, so in order to ensure that everyone’s wellbeing was represented, one of the townsfolk would be picked to sit on the board of decision makers at Meta. This was a big honour, and even included a small financial bonus for the valuable work they did representing their community. Meta hadn’t yet decided who would be a good candidate, so if anybody felt particularly strongly about it, they should try and live in a way that represented the core values of Meta. This person would also get their own private Zuck android to assist them with anything they wanted – although the implication was that this relationship would be sexual – and a large house between the town and Meta headquarters. The town agreed, leaving excited at the prospect of being the model citizen.
Over the next few days, there was a flurry of activity as people tried to be the best version of themselves that they thought Meta wanted them to be. This included a range of activity that was communally minded, from undertaking chores for people to decorating their local environment. The Zucks work was being replaced by people once again, albeit voluntarily, and these human workers interacting with each android was always extremely pleasant and polite. It was deemed that acting like a Zuck was acting in the spirit of the company’s values, and so more and more people imitated the mannerisms, language and style of the Zucks.
Beneath an underpass outside the town, I approach a barrel with a fire burning inside. The punk is waiting for me. We sit on a wooden palette, sharing a bottle of hot sauce.
“I’m the first exile. But I won’t be the last. There’ll be more. We gotta live off grid, live like nomads. I can put a cycle together out of anything. No more of that Meta bullshit, AI cars, androids, phones, none of it. I’m living clean. Real human biker gangs.”
“What will you do to survive?” I ask, lighting a cigarette and offering the punk one.
“We can hit the farms, the water supply, the autotrucks transporting goods between the factories. We keep moving, stay out of the way of the droids. They’ll start arming them, so we need to start arming ourselves. EMP weapons, cloth armour. If the cloth has enough potential rotation it can stop a bullet, same principle as an arrow. It’s the rotational force, you absorb it, the cloth spins with it, slows it down.”
“Sure, I heard of it. Then what?”
“We’ll ride across the wastes of America, taking what we need, trying to avoid the satellites. We’ll need overhead camo, that’s for sure. Maybe have underground grottos where we can raise babies before they can ride on the open road.”
“The empty cities will provide cover, but you’ll have goddamn corpo droids crawling all over them.” I say, looking at the flames.
“They’ll strip everything of resources, even the garbage dumps. They still need rare metals, computer components. That’s why we have to attack the manufacturing plants.”
“You’re thinking too small. You need to attack the brain.” I say, pointing at my forehead.
“Bring down the AI? Heh. You’re shitting me.”
“You can only kill a hydra by severing its brain.”
“The motherlode. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could go back in time before this happened and plant the seed of resistance whilst the nets are still active.”
“It’ll never work.” I say, shaking my head. The punk laughs.
“Whatever it is, I’m not doing nothing about it, no way. The futures not set.”
“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Together we sit in the darkness, watching the flame grow brighter.
